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Game Review

The MMORPG genre has moved more and more towards the â€œtheme parkâ€ philosophy, funneling players through carefully (or not so carefully, in some case) planned and gated content, designed to bring them from the early levels to the endgame, and then keep them interested with raids and whatnot.While this design philosophy is very convenient to attract casual players that tend to lose interest quickly if their hand isnâ€™t constantly held by overprotective developers, it tends to have a rather sad side effect: it chokes gameplay freedom considerably, and forces developers to restrict the influence players have on the world by quite a lot.When XLGAMES set out to create ArcheAge, they decided to base the game on the opposite design philosophy, giving players as much freedom as possible and trying to allow them to influence the gameâ€™s world in a persistent way. Ultimately they are trying to create a sandbox heaven.

The version of the game that I had a chance to try was the one showcased during the 5th Korean Closed Beta this August. The game is supposed to go into Open Beta at the end of the year, and XLGAMES hopes to find a western developer to release on this side of the world in 2013.During Closed Beta 5 there were four playable races. The Caucasian-like Nuians, the Elves, the Asian-like Hariharans and the feline Ferres. There are more planned for release, but we still donâ€™t know much about them. Thankfully thereâ€™s no race or gender locking, so every race can play any combination of classes whatever their gender. Nuians and Elves will start on the western continent, while Hariharans and Ferres will start on the eastern one.Character creation is definitely deep. Each element of the face can be customized fully with a very large number of sliders to create a wide variety of looks. Make-up options, especially for females, are extremely numerous, and there are even several kinds of face paint. Only the hairstyles are a but on the limited side, but this is a beta, and considering that they changed completely from Closed Beta 4, I donâ€™t doubt that weâ€™ll see more in the future.

Facial decorations like scars and tattoos are designed in a definitely interesting way. Once you have chosen the element you want on your characterâ€™s face, you can resize, rotate and move it any way you want, instead of having it limited in a predefined size and position. Thatâ€™s definitely quite the boon to variety in looks, and Iâ€™d love more MMORPGs to follow this approach.ArcheAgeâ€˜s looks derive directly from itâ€™s engine of choice: CryEngine 3. While characters are quite nice, but pretty much on par with many of the MMORPGs in the latest generation, the gameâ€™s environments are downright fantastic, probably the best looking of the current and foreseeable MMORPG market.Not only the environmental design is incredible and massively varied, going from sprawling city-castles built on and around massive cliffs overlooking the sea to basically every kind of natural landscape one can imagine, but the art direction is very compelling, especially thanks to some extensive research in both European and Asian medieval architecture.

In most MMORPGs cities feel largely unnatural, as they tend to be really downscaled compared to an actual city. Even when they are fairly large, they mostly lack the elevation element that would make them really majestic. Thatâ€™s not the case in ArcheAge, where cities are often built with a dominant vertical element that makes their proportion feel realistic. Add to that one of the best lighting engines in the market powering a really impressive night and day cycle, and you get visuals that most other MMOs really struggle to match.

While the great visuals are definitely a boon for ArcheAge, what sets it apart from the rest is its gameplay. But go in an orderly fashion and give a look at what the game doesnâ€™t innovate (at least not that much).There are ten skill trees to chose from, and only four of them are available at level 1. At level five more are unlocked and players are to select a second skill tree to add to the first, and at level ten they get to select a third. The combination of the three chosen skill trees, that include several active and passive skills, pretty much determines a playerâ€™s role between the classic trinity ones: tank, healer and damage dealer (ranged, melee or a mix).The combination of the different trees and the variety of skills included in each (itâ€™s basically impossible to get even near to fill a skill tree completely), ensure a large number of viable builds between different characters, and a very solid potential for customization. The fact that many skills of a tree have synergies with skills of other trees also makes mixing and matching oneâ€™s build quite interesting.

Combat is pretty traditional as well, with the usual TAB targeting and action bar system that you can find in most MMORPGs. There are a few twists like the fact that every character has a bow for pulling and ranged combat and a musical instrument of choice for limited HP and mana regeneration, but weâ€™re pretty much on the realm of the classic MMORPG gameplay here.The death penalty may a bit harsh at first sight, and even slightly old fashioned, with players losing a percentage of their experience to the next level with every death. Luckily the penalty can be completely removed by spending three Labor Points (weâ€™ll talk more in depth about those later), so the system ends up being rather mild.Quests are also pretty traditional, letting players move from hub to hub to complete them, but providing very welcome breaks from the usual â€œkill ten bearsâ€ with crafting missions and some story-driven ones, that unfortunately are powered by â€œpuppet theaterâ€ cutscenes like the ones you find in Guild Wars 2. Not exactly the best in the realm of cinematic glitz.

So if classes, combat and quests are pretty much your usual MMORPG fare, what makes ArcheAge so special?The gameâ€™s world is the first element that comes to mind. I already talked about how visually beautiful it is, but thatâ€™s only the tip of the iceberg. The world is completely seamless. There are no loading screens besides those that lead to instanced dungeons. Everything else exists in the same â€œinstanceâ€, including three whole continents and the sea around them. You can reach every location, explore every nook and cranny, navigate (and swim under) every square mile of sea in search of small islands few others know.Invisible walls? Forget those. Those horrible steep hills designed to funnel you into some bottlenecked passages to the next area? There arenâ€™t any. You can climb every mountain and visit every area without restrictions. While the world has roads and highways designed to lead the way to the various quest hubs and cities, thereâ€™s absolutely nothing that stops you from straying from the marked path. As a matter of fact, some of the vehicles included in the game encourage you to.

Talking about vehicles, ArcheAgeâ€˜s approach to travel is one of the biggest strong points of the overall game and one of the areas that make it unique. You notice that since the moment in which you receive your first mount. Your first valiant horse (at least if youâ€™re human, different races have different starting mounts) wonâ€™t be the usual mount that you pull out of your virtual pocket and then push back in when you donâ€™t need him anymore. Donâ€™t get me wrong, you can do that if you want, but thatâ€™s not the point.When youâ€™re not riding, your horse can actually follow you around and will be there as you fight on foot. As long as heâ€™s there while you kill your enemies heâ€™ll gain experience of his own and increase his own level, earning abilities like self-heals and mounted attacks in the process. Youâ€™ll also be able to equip him with increasingly powerful armor. This deepens the connection with your mount, that becomes a living and growing being instead of a simplistic tool for locomotion that appears and disappears without really being part of your world.

In addition to mounts there are more personal vehicles in the form of gliders and ships.Gliders come in different forms, starting from the basic free one that you can acquire from a quest and that simply glides gradually downwards, to the more advanced ones that carry rockets and bombs that can be used in combat, and are also equipped with propulsion rockets that give a limited boost upwards to achieve almost unlimited flight. All you need to do is to find a relatively high spot and hurl yourself from it with your glider.Flying around like this is actually a lot more fun than the usual flying mount offered by other MMORPGs, as youâ€™re effectively playing with physics, gliding and veering around like you would do in the real world, instead of having a winged horse that is simply suspended in mid air and trudges rather unnaturally around the sky.

The climax of vehicular movement in ArcheAge are ships. As for gliders, there are different kinds of ships in the game, ranging from a simple rowboat to a full fledged warship, passing by fast sailboats. Rowboats are your basic mode of locomotion on the sea surface, and theyâ€™re definitely slow, but can still carry a passenger (or more, if theyâ€™re standing). Sailboats are very fast and fun to navigate, with the ability to assemble different kinds of equipment like cannons or harpoons with a rope that allows them to tug other boats around.It might sound overly dramatic to someone that didnâ€™t play the beta of ArcheAge, but warships are probably the best big toy ever implemented in a MMORPG. They can carry a large number of people and come equipped with multiple cannons. The crew can walk around freely on the decks, and even climb the masts up to the crowâ€™s nest, where a set of binoculars acts as a short-range radar to detect other ships. They can be customized to suit oneâ€™s taste and they even come with lights that can be turned on at night.

Combined with the immense navigable seas of the game, they create a whole new level of gameplay, and an extremely fun one at that. You probably noticed that I talked about cannons, and I did because naval battles are fully implemented in ArcheAge, allowing players to meet in large sea-borne engagements in which whole guilds and alliances can fight it out while crewing several ships.Unmanned vehicles are also available in the form of airships and a sort of steampunkish carts that travel periodically between cities and outposts. Theyâ€™re not as fun as personal vehicles, but theyâ€™re still nice when you want to just cruise around enjoying the environment.One of the best things about ArcheAgeâ€˜s vehicles is that they fully exist within the physical world and can interact freely with each other and with players. In most MMORPGs vehicles are implemented rather awkwardly due to the lack of proper physics, requiring players to actually sit on them in order to ride them, and some times even existing in their own little instances with no external interaction. That doesnâ€™t happen in this game.

In ArcheAge you can easily board an airship, seamlessly jump off from it with your glider, land on a warship, then have a stroll on the deck. See an enemy warship and you donâ€™t want to just fire at it with the shipâ€™s cannons? You can climb on the crowâ€™s nest (or you can land on it to begin with, if youâ€™re good), jump off with your glider again, land on the enemy ship and fight on foot on itâ€™s deck.Everything is seamless. No sitting required and loading screens or awkward transitions are nowhere to be seen. Itâ€™s without any doubt the best implementation of vehicles, their interaction and combat between them that Iâ€™ve ever seen in a MMORPG. Add to that the fact that you can use them to leisurely explore an immense and seamless world, and you got a surefire winning feature.Crafting plays a big part in ArcheAge, even if, for the moment, many of the systems are still in the design phase. Almost everything can be built, from ships to the cannonballs that they fire, from armor to houses and warmachines.

Every activity outside combat, including crafting, gathering, planting and building (and forfeiting the death penalty) costs labor points, that are assigned to the player depending on his level and regenerate over time. All of those activities also grant experience points, meaning that those that will want to focus mostly on their artisan inclinations will be able to do so (within certain limits).Since I mentioned houses and building, Player Housing is another large feature of ArcheAge, and follows the philosophy that aims to allow players to permanently influence the world. Housing zones arenâ€™t instanced, but scattered across the continents. There are even some smaller ones hidden in remote areas, or tucked away on deserted islands to reward exploration.In those areas players can build and furnish several kinds of fully featured homes, that go above and beyond what you see in most MMORPG in terms of interaction. If you see a piece of furniture with drawers you can open them. If thereâ€™s a light or a candle you can light them or turn them off (you can do this with basically every light of the game. If you want to be a troll and turn a whole street dark at night you can just go ahead and douse all the lampposts). You can sit in every chair and lay in every bed. Even the interior of each home is still part of the seamless world instead of being instanced.

Besides your house you can also build your nice little farm, planting tens of types of different trees and crops that will yield wood and materials to be used in crafting, or raising just as many farm animals ranging from chickens to cows.The fun part is that planting trees isnâ€™t just limited to housing zones. ArcheAge is all about influencing the world around you, so if you see a nice spot that would look even nicer with a forest, you can just grab some seed and plant the forest yourself. It will take a while for it to grow, but what other MMORPG allows that? Of course, since freedom is another basic concept of the game, someone else can just as well come around and chop your forest down to get wood in order to build his ship or something else.The whole northern continent is divided in territories that can be claimed by guilds as their own, allowing them to build whole walled cities that they can then administer, populate with their residences and decorate exactly like the housing zones.

While the system still wasnâ€™t in place in the beta, other guilds will be able to attack those territories enacting full fledged siege battles that will include siege engines and artillery, with the gliders offering the chance to perform aerial attacks.Ultimately, if youâ€™re tired of the â€œtheme parkâ€ philosophy in MMORPGs and if you long to play in a world in which you can have an actual, lasting impact, that you can fully explore and that gives you awesome toys to play with in almost total freedom, then ArcheAge is a game you should keep an eye on.We still donâ€™t know exactly when itâ€™ll be localized for the western market, but should XLGAMES manage to fully exploit the potential of ArcheAge, fans of sandbox games and roleplayers will have a rather fantastic treat waiting for them.

Trion Worlds has signed a deal with South Koreaâ€™s XL Games to bring the big-budget fantasy role-playing game ArcheAge to Western markets. It will publish the game on its Red Door online commerce platform in North America and Europe. The deal represents a major bet on the massively multiplayer online gaming business, which is competing fiercely for the attention of consumers alongside rivals such as social, mobile, and console games.

The title has spent six years in development, and its creator is Jake Song, who made the smash hit online game Lineage. It has been in closed beta tests for two years and has launched in beta testing in Korea. For Trion, the deal is a big coup, said Lars Buttler, the chief executive of Redwood City, Calif.-based Trion, in an interview with GamesBeat. He described ArcheAge as having an â€œincredible amount of polish.â€ Trion aims to launch the game later this year in North America, Europe, Turkey, Australia, and New Zealand.Trion is the publisher of Rift, another fantasy MMO that also took about six years to make. Buttler said that the game generated more than $100 million in revenue for Trion in its first nine months, and the title will soon be coming out in China, one of the biggest MMO markets. Trion also developed an online games publishing platform dubbed Red Door, which it can use to publish games developed by other companies. One of the premier games coming up is Crytekâ€™s Warface, a modern combat shooter that is expected to be published this year.

ArcheAge might seem similar to Rift, but Buttler says the two are different. ArcheAge is divided into two continents. The western one (Nuia) is designed to appeal to Western gamers, while the eastern one (Harihara) is targeted at Asian gamers, who prefer different art styles.

â€œWeâ€™re thrilled to be working with Trion Worlds, a company who is setting a new standard for gaming by embracing original, high-quality [games] on a dynamic connected platform,â€ said Song, the CEO and founder of XL Games. â€œWe are impressed with Trionâ€™s track record as they have consistently delivered against an unwavering vision; we are confident partnering with Trion will help bring ArcheAge the success it deserves.â€

Buttler described Song as a â€œperfectionist in the best way.â€

The addition of ArcheAge will give Trion a busy spring, with Rift China, ArcheAge, and Defiance (an MMO that is debuting in conjunction with the launch of a SyFy channel show on television starting in April) all moving into large-scale beta tests that precede official launches.

â€œWe could have half a dozen launches this year,â€ said Buttler. â€œWe are on an amazing inflection point now. We think MMOs will be the winning platform.â€

Buttler also said that company will publish its MMOs on â€œany connected device.â€ His company is operating â€œgames as a service,â€ where you launch a game and continually update it.

In ArcheAge, players choose a continent and then launch a virtual life in the online world. They can design their own characters and engage in all sorts of activities such as farming, flying, trading, building ships, creating underwater gardens, fighting naval battles, and more.

â€œItâ€™s all you expect from a triple-A game,â€ he said. â€œIn this category, you have to see World of Warcraft as competition.â€

Tencent will introduce ArcheAge in China while GameOn will publish it in Japan. GigaMedia will publish it in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Macao. Thatâ€™s as close to a global launch as any MMO has ever had. Trion will translate the title and make changes to suit Western audiences.

Buttler described Red Door as a true web-based platform consisting of the back-end infrastructure and monetization tools for a huge online game. It has a development platform aimed at speeding up publication and a server architecture designed for dynamic events, where changes happen to the game world on the fly.Meanwhile, Buttler said that the company has delayed the launch of its End of Nations real-time strategy MMO. The title was made by external developer Petroglyph Games in Las Vegas. But Petroglyphâ€™s contract expired, and Trion decided to bring the game in-house to finish it, said Buttler. That resulted in layoffs at Petroglyph at the end of 2012, and Trion absorbed a number of its developers. That team is now making the game â€œmore accessible,â€ said Buttler. That means the team is making it easier for players to get started more gently.â€œIt will take longer, but it was the right decision to bring it in-house and polish it more,â€ he said.

But the delay isnâ€™t a problem since Trion will be more than busy publishing other titles in the first part of the year, said Buttler.

While Rift was tied to the PC, future titles will run across platforms. Defiance, for instance, will be published simultaneously on the Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, and the PC. Over time, Buttler said the company will embrace smartphone and tablet platforms in a bigger way. Right now, Rift has companion apps, but those donâ€™t let you play the same game while on the run.

Trion has a big war chest to publish huge games. The company raised $85 million in early 2012. Trion has more than 500 employees.

â€œWe created a wish list from day one with the start of Red Door,â€ said Buttler. â€œWe got Warface from Europe, and from Asia, we got ArcheAge.â€

ArcheAge Headstart in abt 3 hours. Free to play for all in 4 days (16 Sept). We will be on Ollo server. Haranya East faction. We will not be rushing for anything but rather, it will be a laid back relaxing play. So if you're interested to join us, you may apply for Guild at http://einsofgaming.com/archeageapply